| aphrodite's garden volume 1 part 2 - 1985 june-july | work & days: a lifetime journal project |
18 June Mastitis and biopsy appointment. Night dream J in a bed rolling clasped with Rhoda. The little boy with T? Sorcery fear I am going to die and he's for them. They engulf J and the baby. My connection with J is because of them, with Michael, even, and the way he's been running into Rho everywhere. Is anyone outside it. I won't let them have him, I'll - Jam is playing father toward her family and family figures. Accessory to a tableau. Having Sandy see her someway. I indulge. Who buys shares. Who he'll be like. Panic. So many old maids at the trough. What kind of life am I to allow. Her plan for the first moon party and naming. Stop and think of the meaning. She is so avid simply to play in that assignment. Want the experience of doing, or want the gazes directed at that importance. I don't watch into her. The way he attracts. This time I'm not being the young mother. Surprised at being in a circle with him, glad not to give his name. There's wanting it to be cancer so I'll have a named battle not this suspicion of witchcraft and the something maybe suspended - these years to be brought to a fightable point. A closed circuit in the sexual parts. The way lovemaking stays in me. "Such hypochondria can also be grasped as an amorousness drawn back upon itself in respect of the organ concerned." "A security." "I know what you mean." "You didn't imagine it, it was all true." "I know because the voice I wrote it with is a good one." Didn't say much today but sat with his hands around the little body. Clown hair and such a bright eyed kindly distinguished Dutch father look, new steady eye lines and livest round lip. Plant drawings. 19th The faces heavy and small. I needn't look for the pretty ones. Laid him on a pallet in the morning room to sun his lito triango. Some crows' rhythm like his. From the garbage cans hearing it maybe. 2-stroke rasp. This time it only took sitting down next to him to bring him quiet. The little settling motions of his mouth. I haven't resolved them yet to resee them. Yesterday the last evening feeding, lamplight, his eyes flitting southwest, rolling across north, sinking, showing up sharp southwest again and with it an inward smile like someone seeing fairies. Heat. Sometimes a west wind. Today, so often baring tits, the whole day without free going out. I call her. She goes to Stel. I pace in Queen Elizabeth Park. Old parents. The Indian women's silk squares held out to the wind. 20 Looking to find poem sequence, see they stopped when I began having days with M. Then it became times and places. Lonely as it's fine weather days, want to be not idle, Oppenheimer Park to be out, the horrible bodies sunning, Calling internally Michael! to see a likeable head. But when he's here it is wrong by the sense of having nothing better to do. Talk to me. But he cdn't. Still, only to see. Green treat. Ammi's boring fabulous times. Andy "a wonderful journey in the 4th dimension". Sara raving. Laiwan details of the pleasures of dancing. She when I say I'm boring chides me, doesn't understand what I need. 21 He wants to be awake at 5:30, lies on his pillow sobbing while I sleep. "You're ugly and boring." I dream looking for Lauderic's Christmas dinner, 60 in a hotel. The fat black man pressing my back, etc. In the corridor his screams bring me to the open door of the right suite, open my eyes, he's gone. Laid down for the morning, he yells. I pick him up finally. He has to decelerate, sob, sob. The beleidicht curl of his lower lip makes me love him. He stops crying. Goes to sleep. I put him down. 22 The smells. He can't tell me where they bring him. Hotel stairs in his ear. Feeling the underpull - not now when I try to see it - have a few times just glimpsed it - in the dizzying stock of notes. Dream again a small airline plane I might catch, the small flight of stairs. J, C, Ed, wanting formulas. Theoreein to look at. Theory is a view. Formula or procedure. Software. J and I trading language successes unpleasantly. That relation of alone and with. The way Michael is alert to improvise. Aha! and here. There's wanting to save and use. Time not to die. Says: I cd just destroy it all, to say, I give up hoarding and cudding. There. The relation to the word. Glad to have a use for it. Afraid of spirit action. Don't want to think unless it is visible to see again. Working with Michael's lack of storage. I'm setting them opposite. Rightaway telling her. Speed. The two of cups. Michael will you let me have your image. His room. The fantasy was of a movie of a woman on skid row standing in the sandwich line working the math for a theory of chaos. Etc. Incidental baby. She does a reading. M holds the baby, I am behind the camera. Going in the aft - her anxiety - to Burnaby. Lawn, strangers, men, shrubs, children, she with 3 sizes of cutters snipping tips, in the van the baby asleep. Then 2 mamas baby worship, he's a cutie, etc, he's very good, he recognizes his mum. What's it for. I'm holding it off as if it is to bite me. "I'm Jewel" says the mum in. Her voice coming, want to make ingenious. What it's like. Being with the mums relaxed not holding an image against distrust (and yet-). Quite a lot of quiet enquiring, face to face. The kids' fantasia the adults seem to hate. Looking at the kids like looking at Michael. They're vivid. Is anyone not. The baby and Muss both overblown. Whether it was a wife relation? Didn't feel suppressed. But not wanting to talk about my work as if it's imposture. Is it different. An Air India plane falls into the sea off the coast of Ireland. The voice of an Irish radio reporter standing in Cork airport. Line of tune 'from the' Isle of Mull. Longing to go to those places: any open square, table under heaven, a fire. I dreamed: his name is Michael. We can't name him because we aren't willing to know. I dreamed Rhoda at the front of a class having her turn. She's awkward looking at us not the blackboard (like an unconscious presence if I don't speak to them). Trudy beside me says why. Then she has drawn in white chalk a woman in a bed. They're guessing what is it. I see then in colored chalk the woman with a baby in the crook of her arm, top of the baby's head toward us, the woman arching her shoulder blades, as an image moving to show us what she is, as a person moving to get her breast to the baby's head. Last summer's Adonis feast. The small gardens aborted, sundried and thrown into springs or the sea. I'm impatient about the old fuss about house and family unknowing. I say we're farther away than we ever have been. She says we're tired. I say I'm doing it her way and the actual complaint is when I was giving it everything why didn't you like it. She says, You have difficulty concealing your resentment at any repressing. Quickly, Yes and at my own agreement to the repressing. Being without a base: what does she know. The so many small matings. Even here, the careful phrasing. (Who's overlooking hers.) When she's weeping, why. I know I mustn't ask. She says, I must go and move about now. I know I can't comfort her. She'll hate it if I try. Defeats me again. (The demands of a child and after the war -.) Haunted by aloof weeping. Phone rings. It will be Michael. John Guri sweeping up dust. The face in front of me. Aiie. "There are so many things I can't tell her." He says "Are you and Jam touching each other a lot these days? I understandsomething aliddlebitmore." Zipping the blue pouch and glimmering in the pleasure of physical liking joke. How grievous the image of this simple liking would be. Teenage or daddy clothes - the hard triangle - an alongside fit. He said, You're not so freaked out. What you're doing might be a breakthrough for other people too. Freaked out is the eyes straining. 24 What's the relation of the Greek-Irish etc season feeling, landscape magic, with the color-sound-magnetic-iconic. A darker turn. Second day she takes the morning but is unable later. Now is she going to learn she doesn't want to. And the man comes here to work, I'm remembering what made me retract. The boy screams from 2 till 9 when not held. Looks alert, was that the first directed smile. Afternoons eating every hour or less. It's better having doing and someone else to hold, afternoon on the porch, scraping and sanding cedar, but looking and saying it's too much for me. Persons. Any. Today someone other than yesterday. 25 Thon-po, Mor and Allie. We want to call him our little myth, make him the foretold one. Histor knowing, narrar to relate. To travel is to take a path. 27 Weak crying over there. Sing and rub. He's on his stomach for some sleeping now. These three past days more awake, two afternoons sleeping little eating often. (Yesterday mastitis, resting, Dr Kuusk needle biopsy.) Today often staring at my face. Once as he nursed and I was looking out the window, or at the wall, thinking, I looked at him and he looked away. Now this evening after talking with J about Mary's letter and Sarah's, the Port Moody road, the grass field down from Burnaby Mountain, Dairy Queen parking lot seeing the green house with roses. Feeling it possible to think more carefully, less angrily, separate talking from discharge, see what makes the little soul cry. M today saying we should stop flirting. I agree, flirtatiously, but then really agree and from writing in the Loong Foong am fast and cheerful when he calls to reverse, and then when a sex telephoner pretends to be doing a survey - 28 From 5 he sleeps on my chest. When they go away I sleep 'til 9. Yest dream of over the border, the first car I pass, J in the corridor, she is in the compartment she took me to when we were first together, with someone else. A small Chinese girl runs out. There's white and gold, relatives, an estate. I go on with the baby now a small boy holding my hand to the next car, a ward, I think at first, of veteran paraplegics, people with prostheses. In the centre a girl maybe 5 years old, fair like Andy's Emily, in underpants, with plastic breasts, dancing barefoot. Her feet not artificial. She's stepping-dancing, looking at me. I walk past looking at her. (I'm just now seeing the image on the world card.) She came, it was after we cried together the evening before, I was ill, she exhausted. I tell her the dream. She asks about the five years. I don't then see why. This morning when she was with him I dreamed a poem laid out in good color. It's about nature. On the back page of the ms a canopy like something I think Tibetan, pinks etc on blue paper. White print. A wide piece. An animated movie he made. The milkman in uniform standing on his head beside the cow, falls over slowly in stages, gets up, meets the man from out of the house. Nearly morning, pan down to his pockets, a toothbrush in each. That's the joke and also information. Line drawing like coloring book. Wake thinking art completed in dreams. If it were remembered and done. The cartoon a new humor. Goes on as these days, run the bath, turn on the oven, cut bread, undress myself and him wondering about the window, swim him, he gazes. When he begins to cry lift him out, he cries, is it the heaviness come on him. Quickly fold the towel over him, dry in the creases and pat the top of the head. Diaper and stretch suit, put him and the pillow under the table. He stops crying and looks. I get back in the water, wash face and armpits with soap, fur bush with hand, splash out near him, dress. Bring him into the kitchen to sit. Make toast and peanut butter. Walk to corner store with him on chest, to buy milk. Come back, make tea, take toast and tea to bedroom. Put him to bed on face, touch his back. Sit in bed try again to write Mary, pleased, it seems more from recent selves. Daphne phones. Michael phones and almost then he's arrived distraught. Passionate face like young ones crying out word by word he doesn't want to live like a machine. His face is Mike but the forehead pulled to the knot. I don't want to be grim. Look on to the grief mask I hope carefully, but distancing. Walk out. The Tak Kee waitresses gathered putting together. He meets John the musician, the two tall thin ones on the street with Mike's baby. Mary's letter while I eat noodle soup. Then I hold the pouch on chest. What it's like not taking in his look. J, an evening, Deer Lake, at first not and then on the swings. What he wants, do I too, I want some of it. A tear for Camelot. Shall we be mom and dad. Why is Mor, is it most? The conversation in the next swings. Driving back, the story of Adonis, how I arched against the apple tree. Embarrassing. The girl in Sweet Cherubim who pats her hair. Going home in twilight she goes the wrong way. We arrive at the garden. Mor. Is it mine? Mor La Glace. Thon Mor. Cold kisses. 29 The grass field. How to write Mary. Third day. I wanted to cut her off. You drag on my courage. Grass mix. Near and far. Sync sound. (An unnumbered.) Sound - diff voices saying sibillants. There. Burnaby Mountain 1985. Fading through. Stop-start. A spoken. Pave. Dark. Memories in. (After Daph. while he's walking.) In Loong Foong, What do you think of my - figger? Her purple one. Put your mummy where my mouth is. So much in a day. Finding a brief sure voice for M. Then Daph. Then Michael's room. He's a painter today. I'm respectful. Being instantly on the old painting. What he meant. Dwarf head in the corner. Did we all fore-cast. I ask for another two hours. At home alone see a pave piece. A tent. A man listening. Pavilion. Butterfly. Imagine the grass one. Phone rings while he's just come home and we're looking at a beautiful mood. She's breaking down. We'll come. Knocking at door. A candle. She's sliding tears, wants to hold him, keeps on sliding. I mustn't hover, think of it as spill. Walking, the houses separate in a transubstantiated light. Seeing it on the park, seeing I'm not seeing it, I'm not seeing in it, that would be past what I think I can - but just the almost, the edge, seeing what seeing would be - like a strip - with you. We stop and pass the baby and go below. A grain smell. "And horses." Loosestrife. Concrete squares. The ladder home. Today as you were grieving and spilling, telling you I'll learn with you now. 28 Folds under the eye. Red hair tie. I know what needs, but how to be quiet enough to give it. Body warmth. One hand, on the baby. Something from above the head, from a distance. The hand flat and cold like a metal talisman for healing. Somewhile later she brings her feet. A foot taking heat without warming, like frozen. Meltwater at the eyes. Then remembering talking through the night in the phone booth at the store. The light rain. The couple on a motorcycle, dawn. We come through to laughing. Going home chilled so deep I couldn't sleep, happy. Then, think that was the morning I found the mouse in the honey. I had to wash it off. It was shaking with cold. Because its fur was stuck down, it was as if bald. I washed it in warm water. Had to make a fire to heat the water. I remember the feel of washing it, it was pregnant, this little swelled body. I used soap too, to melt the honey off. I had to rinse it. Then I put it in a little box in the warming closet. Did it struggle? Yes but it was very feeble, it had been struggling all night probably. Later on when I heard it rustling I let it out. "Your little stories about mice and moles like wands and medicaments." The sense beside her of writing possible and beyond what I ever try. Aft. Going the trail to Al's place and sitting on minute shell beach under crochet hangings, spider-line color runs up. Seeing across to Baghdad, sail away to Michael, sail back to Browning inventing the whole of the sensitive chaos of the conversation, 'from and into', word by word. She was saying the story this morning was addressed to a situation I didn't know. How many lives could begin at that moment. "It's because you're in an open time." He lies on the kitchen floor, one hand up on the couch slanted toward me, beaming about having found a different way to read my writing. Glad to know somebody hasn'tbin wastin' their time. Sunny glimmer, easy to laugh, pulling the curtain, end of the first act. Wrong with Anne. He fussing on shoulder. Sorry - I just warmed over. 30th Morning, he's asleep on my chest, I'm asleep too, a page I'm reading, a phrase about a baby, I'm setting it where I see it goes. A small sound, she's coming in, "I was just writing." That I'd always choose her, my image-voice saying firmly and also - The most beautiful of her faces, fairy antennas moving mouth, brown spots on a slope, eastern eyelash. Little fuck with swirl over. Posts in the sea each with a spot of lawn. Wind, sweater stretched over him nursing, hurt about 'Rowen', foaming up, stretched small bends and pressures. "I like you in the dark." Opening my eyes not wanting to see. Feeling simple, putting out my hand to cover the wrong face. Natural. 2 July Cantonese cell. Evening. Screaming. Screaming from last night. Every feeding through the night, this morning at five-thirty, slow to sleep, little quiet time, yelling while Kika was here. M doesn't come 'til evening. Yelling. Bathed fed cuddled put into bed. Could pound him now. I've done this with two strangers. He's strange too. I lift him out to suck. He's grimacing. He finishes sucking, starts to yell. Shoulder, arm. Yells. Bed on face or back. Listening to whether the yells go on to berzerk or shudder down. 3 Pounding the couch, eyes closed. He interferes his arm. Open eyes to dust air rising. "Spit in my face." Both pumping our cheeks. ppPT. Nice big packet. He falls back laughing. Resting quiet in freedom. The city a small mass. Lights in lines and blocs. Red containers. Snow around lights orange. The chain fence. Baby has gone to sleep on my chest sitting on thigh. She says it's changed. Only that I'm to admit it. Tell her parents. It unsnarls to. Afraid with each other. Hope and fear. 12 lb, 21". Today argued, many days do, with T, J. Yelling about when they lived in the house. What I don't like in our language. Who is watching. With little sitting in the garden with his back at my chest, held by big hand, looks all around. 5th He dreams: his sister and brother up the road looking after the baby, something is wrong, baby screaming, he wants to go to him. I dream going with J on a job she wants for me. Military descent, tan uniforms, poison or disaster. I say I'm sick, don't want to go down the iron staircase. Can I get off the island, will the ferryman without authorization as I leave pick up the screaming baby, carrying rubber boots and other, the stress so much, the baby's hallucinating. Skyscrapers fallen over, layered image. I hallucinated his in his screaming. The last night the ferry gone without us. Night workers a few in the waiting room. Weeding for Elfreda and Paul [Jam's neighbours]. She with leg scars, high blood pressure, diabetes, he grossly fat. The heat. I sit in the garden in battle dress holding a very nice baby. And J was with T in a café. M in twilight when I'm going to step into water, wants to care for his baby more. I say don't come. He comes. I say I'm frightened. Why did I do it like this. He says, It is so different for you, you can't expect it to be smooth, you have to go back and forth. Jules et Jim. I thought she was going to drive off the wharf. I was thinking of being ready to jump out, I didn't know how to save myself and him too. Sandy dreams it's junk food for me at Jam's house. - Time can't be saved. It dies. "It is hard to let your life diverge unknown." Am I going to be more with you in another way. Can I be close to myself now. 8 Going ahead saying his name is Rowen Epp. Howl. [summary of the time since June 9] 7 What is left is the baby, Michael friendly, Jamila in mind, the day, the night. A moment on the path weeding when the Chinese girl came out to speak to me and was stopped by my stiffness in pain. Sharp pang. Going on transitionally. Love time, be true in it. 8 my baby is a sore one jumpy arcing his back startling from early sleep- 9 Tuesday. The heat. Intimacy with the neighbour interiors. Morning we're ready early, he at 4:30 and then going on awake. Nurse, bathe, clean clothes. This morning he has ten minutes quiet in his armchair. Sleeping in the other room. Steps. The firm ones. In her blue coat. She takes off. Black shirt and light look. Pretending to glare. Laugh. Touching waist and back. Live buzz from her triangle on my leg. Say we're resting. A smile on her clearer face. Let's not talk a lot, we're doing this better. Turkey plate at Princess Café. He wails in the sac. In the armchair reading primal gospel. Believing. How brutal I was to Luke. Everyone is. Wanting to, in the book, recircuit. Self-holding insanities. Reading. Eating. Predicting. Explaining the other. Split being, the messages somehow on hold. Aft Michael is gaunt, looks ill, starved, obsequious, making frightened jokes. Did I do that. When I close my eyes delight, slow turning my face perfectly on dark collar cotton. The quality of palm cling on hard shapes. Right slowness. When Rowen screams in the evening - I'm there next to him - he's beside himself - not hungry, not alone, frenzy I remember under the table at Hope campground. Winds down and starts again. When I lift him it stops but crying in my arms is what made me try. I'm partly blind to it, don't feel it. The weather in the streets. 10 The going-softly summings after separation. The companion she has by her when alone, the photo on her table, woman and baby, baby real, woman in reflection. Woman in oval, the birth bed, lamp and flowers. Creeping step. Wanting to live in relation with death, a certain length of time I am giving myself. Immortality. By that she means gender obsession. I say the little one has to have Michael because he is slower than we are. If I see Michael I have to touch him. That's the decision, but I feel so sharp her missing the baby. She said today he has new sounds. No one to know that. "For a while." "I don't think you're meant to be with men. I think you're meant to be with me. I see myself in China turning and seeing you." Michael going downstairs with the green umbrella and baby pouch. "I do have to take it as far with Michael as I can." "I'm seeing how much I've resisted." A soft change these days. "Maybe then there are other things you won't have to resist." "I think so." "I'm afraid of your pain because it comes to me." At the top of the stairs where I've come to head her off, "I'm suffering away from you," whispers. She telling me Sandy looking long at the photo I took of myself after the birth. The baby has to have Michael because my father. And hers. Why must the birth channel have Michael/father/brother/neighbour. Because I'm good enough and not too good for all of these: infold. "We have no time anymore to be with each other as we were." "People don't like to have children for that reason." "That isn't our worry anymore." Briskly: "Yes, but I have a child now."
Watching so intent, now will I find out what was the secret she's kept these years. Or: what is the future that was haunting me, now that she's got the story that haunted her. Beyond that, what was organizing us. Speaking in tarot, telling me I would have both. Arranging the crossing paths. Being what the grass story tells her. Noticing I'm uneasy with the garden this year, [because] the flowering times I've liked, are so brief. The urgency in coll: Michael has to fuck me. I'm in mortality too. "Both Jam and Michael are helping." "Jam and I saw a wonderful thing two evenings ago on Burnaby Mountain. A long wide slope that had been seeded to lawn had been left uncut this year, and the patches of grasses in the lawn mix, fescue, Kentucky bluegrass, couch, red clover and others I don't know, were just coming into flower. The different red-browns, greens, blonds, the fine crossings of the stalks, the cleanness, brightness, liveliness, the proportions of the spaces taken by each kind, the sharpness before seed and laciness after, the many ways it could be seen and then the exquisite pattings and bowings of air movement in it, looking to me like the little movements of baby-hands that we watch these days. And then Jam noticed she was standing in a field of flowering grass with no allergy. I remembered it was often this time of year when I'd come up north and the ditches would give me so much delight." [letter to Mary] When he comes after Aphrodite melt fantasies this morning, six kids and the loving thin man, a pang and tear, why. At the thought of - he helps me find it - the image of - I'm afraid he has AIDS, which is, he has, which is - death. 12 For the first time since May moving the blue chest, sweeping behind it. Confetti, yellow mauve purple, phlox lilac mock orange. Now jasmine. In the first of this night's nights going down through thickness out the peninsula to open water, maybe to where I could see it, as if running away, turning back feeling the way, my hand down to feel the prints in the snow. May lose them, such sheets of wind; I am the wind screaming up toward home saying the wolf is soundless yell the wind. Might have been that. Then the faces of the natives I've come to, wild people weathered brown, dirty and fine. The wind she is in Jacob's room.
The wane of a plank. Between the two idols - the one I am always speaking to, the one body to see. In Janov, babies being in a time of organizing their molecular (endocrinal) possibilities, potentials, modes. The way in mornings early but after six hrs sleep he has a fit of clawing, digging. Frantic. Was with Carmichael. He's kissing Jam who was rolls of fat on hands and feet. Sterilization wd mean I wdn't get infected! Confined with his remarks. It is they come to me in a way that's mine. First: just sitting looking at the photos the heat that says, yes here. And then looking very close by his face feeling into somewhere, his world I think. It's as if I'm saying, yes I'm going to come with you, looking close by his eyes and skin and at the same time intently I'm somewhere I think he may be, wide and still, colored, more I can't remember, but saying with him, yes it seems I'm going with you and it is right, it's in life, it's away from sickness. And now again, hatred of Trudy, who took her. She's suddenly there in a red shirt saying, I'm going to -- --, two syllables, a place in Mexico. Now? Nod. She turns and runs. I walk out to look after her. She's not there, but Trudy, who's excited about a kind of singing she's figured out. She and Jam are booked for a tour of Mexico, the taxi waiting.
aphrodite's garden volume 2
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